Andy Eyre's DPhil thesis "On the Dynamics of Tidal Streams in the Milky Way Galaxy" was the runner up in the competition for the 2010 Michael Penston Prize for the best astronomy thesis submitted to a UK university during 2010. Andy was a member of the Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics and rebuilt the Centre's computer system in parallel with completing his thesis.

A gamma-ray burst detected by NASAʼs Swift satellite may be the most distant object known in the Universe. The burst marked the explosion of a massive young star at a time when the Universe was only about half a billion years old (compared to its present age of 13.7 billion years). The discovery paper was led by Antonino Cucchiara (formerly Penn State, now at UC Berkeley) and is presented in the Astrophysical Journal by an international team of astronomers, including Oxford astronomers Philipp Podsiadlowski and Christian Wolf.

The 2nd Fast Imaging Sensors Workshop was held at the Jesus College Conference Centre on 5 May 2011, organised by Andrei Nomerotski (Oxford Physics), Mark Brouard and Claire Vallance (Oxford Chemistry), and Renato Turchetta (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, RAL). The aim of the workshop was to review progress in the field of fast two-dimensional detectors, as well as to discuss their current and potential future applications.

Scientists from Oxford University and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have completed a painstaking mapping of one of the most exotic places in the universe found close to absolute zero. The ‘quantum spin liquid’ is a strange state of matter whose existence was proposed in the 1970s but which has only been observed recently. Until now, there has been extremely limited information available describing its physical characteristics.

Oxford researchers Peter Babkevich, D. Prabhakaran and Andrew Boothroyd, together with Paul Freeman from Berlin, have uncovered new evidence that dynamic stripe fluctuations play an important role in the copper oxide high temperature superconductors. Their results, which appeared in Nature magazine on 17 March, will assist the search for a mechanism of high temperature superconductivity.